Preserved Wook is an oldtime New England railway engineman who calls to life again the history & technology not only of the steam locomotive in the LAST Steam Age of the Old Atlantic West, but of many a wonderful way of getting around in the World, in a better time when travel indeed was for the few…and the very few!

Power In Another Age

The picture above of one of the largest and most powerful steam locomotives ever built tellsits own tale. It is coal-fired Union Pacific Big Boy [4-8-8-4] locomotive No. 4007 departing Laramie, Wyoming, August 17, 1957. It shows in a way that words alone cannot how far behind us now the late-modern is. That oldtime age indeed ended in November of 1989 with the pulling down of the wall in Berlin, only thirty-two years after the picture above was made. And now, fifty-one years on, we only need look around us, away from our overheated PC monitors and out of the window, to see for ourselves that these are no longer modern days.

Seeing is believing, and the following online archive complied by Richard Leonard is decisive: